Why was Re:Library Down? #2

From our previous post, I’ve outlined the lack of resources as the main reason for the downtime.

But there’s actually more to it. After doing an extensive research, I found that it is recommended to have 1GB of RAM just to handle 2500 traffic alone, not including the http request and anything else. Obviously, 256MB was unable to handle all the traffics.

Jetpack is one of the most essential plugin but it also consumes most of the resources, as you can see, we have already disabled Jetpack, that’s why you are unable to login with WordPress.com account, unable to comment with social media account, unable to follow subscription, and many more. Heck, I can’t even see the site stats without Jetpack.

Other reason for the downtime was because we did not properly setup the cache. If we did, we can decrease at least 50% of the stress on the server. And we also don’t have Content Delivery Network (CDN), which could speed up our site considerably, but it’s going to cost some money.

The main culprit was that we are using a SHARED HOSTING, which was recommended to us by Hayate. After doing some research of my own, I found that on a shared service, you might get hundreds of people on the same server. This means that a hundred people share the same hard drive space, memory, CPU speed and bandwidth. Resources are not shared evenly, a faulty site may use up 80% of a server’s resources, leaving 99 other users with the remaining 20% or worse.

It was recommended not use shared hosting unless you absolutely have to, or you have a lot of sites you don’t really use at all. These cost around $6.20/month and that’s about what you get. Unreliable service prone to going down due to others overusing resources.

We probably need to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) soon, it cost more or less around $35/month for a server with only 512MB. That’s not all, we have to manually install the cPanel in the VPS, which will cost us another $20/month for the license. In other words, we need no less than $55/month (more if we include CDN) to upgrade to a server with only 512MB of RAM.

It’s a little on the high side, even with revenues we were getting from the old site, we only got like $50/month on average. And half of those are shared with the authors and translators, leaving me with a measly amount. So moving to a VPS now is going to prove a little difficult.

So what’s the plan for now? Since we have already moved, it’s too late to turn back now, we can only move forward. For now, we will stick with SHARED HOSTING for a while and continue tweaking our site, if we can manage to run our site more smoothly on this chaotic server, then by the time we move to VPS, we will get a much better result in return.

P.S. And here is where I enter a meaningful quote; Nothing in this world happens for no reason, if we made a mistake, then we just have make sure we don’t make the same mistake again. People learn and grow with experience.